A very popular service in the field of telecommunications is a form of private call screening. With this service, a caller who wishes to avoid transmitting his/her telephone number via incoming caller line identification (ICLID) can still convey his/her identity to a called party. In the most common arrangement, the caller records his/her name or some other characteristic utterance and that recorded name or utterance is revealed to the called party in order to allow that party to make a decision as to whether or not to accept the call. The service is used for customers who do not wish to automatically accept calls from callers whose identity has been suppressed. Callers may suppress their identity by having a class of service in which this is done or by dialing a prefix such as *67 to suppress the identity on a particular call. The object is to control communications with a possible harasser without revealing a return telephone number and to keep the telephone number secret from benign parties who may be careless in revealing that number. In some applications, when the called party is unavailable, voice messaging is suppressed unless the revealed identity of the caller is on a list of the called party.
While the service performs a very useful function, as shown by its popularity, the usefulness of the function is still open to improvement.